Thread: Comey, Unsettled by Trump, Is Said to Have Wanted Him Kept at a Distance

Comey, Unsettled by Trump, Is Said to Have Wanted Him Kept at a Distance

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
MAY 18, 2017

WASHINGTON — President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.

Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquiries to the Justice Department, according to those people.

After explaining to Mr. Trump how communications with the F.B.I. should work, Mr. Comey believed he had effectively drawn the line after a series of encounters he had with the president and other White House officials that he felt jeopardized the F.B.I.’s independence. At the time, Mr. Comey was overseeing the investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

Those interactions included a dinner in which associates of Mr. Comey say Mr. Trump asked him to pledge his loyalty and a meeting in the Oval Office at which Mr. Trump told him he hoped Mr. Comey would shut down an investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Trump has denied making the request.

The day after the Flynn conversation, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Comey to help push back on reports in the news media that Mr. Trump’s associates had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.

Mr. Comey described all of his contacts with the president and the White House — including the phone call from Mr. Trump — in detailed memos he wrote at the time and gave to his aides. Congressional investigators have requested copies of the memos, which, according to two people who have read them, provide snapshots of a fraught relationship between a president trying to win over and influence an F.B.I. director and someone who had built his reputation on asserting his independence, sometimes in a dramatic way.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Thursday that “the sworn testimony” of both Mr. Comey and Andrew G. McCabe, the F.B.I.’s acting director, “make clear that there was never any attempt to interfere in this investigation. As the president previously stated, he respects the ongoing investigations and will continue working to fulfill his promises to the American people.”

It is not clear whether in all their interactions Mr. Comey answered Mr. Trump’s question or if he ever told him whether he was under investigation. In the letter Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Comey last week in which he informed him that he had been fired, Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”

The F.B.I.’s longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, had close relationships with several presidents. But in the modern F.B.I., directors have sought an arm’s length relationship with the presidents they serve and have followed Justice Department guidelines outlining how the White House should have limited contact with the F.B.I.

Those guidelines, which also cover the F.B.I., prohibit conversations with the White House about active criminal investigations unless they are “important for the performance of the president’s duties and appropriate from a law enforcement perspective.” When such conversations are necessary, only the attorney general or the deputy attorney general can initiate those discussions.

Mr. Comey has spoken privately of his concerns that the contacts from Mr. Trump and his aides were inappropriate, and how he felt compelled to resist them.

“He had to throw some brushback pitches to the administration,” Benjamin Wittes, a friend of Mr. Comey’s, said in interviews.

Mr. Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, recalls a lunch he had with Mr. Comey in March at which Mr. Comey told him he had spent the first two months of Mr. Trump’s administration trying to preserve distance between the F.B.I. and the White House and educating it on the proper way to interact with the bureau.

Mr. Wittes said he never intended to publicly discuss his conversations with Mr. Comey. But after The New York Times reported earlier this month that shortly after his inauguration Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey for a loyalty pledge, Mr. Wittes said he saw Mr. Trump’s behavior in a “more menacing light” and decided to speak out.

Mr. Wittes said Mr. Comey told him that despite Mr. Trump’s attempts to build a personal relationship, he did not want to be friendly with the president and thought any conversation with him or personal contact was inappropriate.

Their conversation took place after Mr. Comey’s phone call with the president, Mr. Wittes said, and Mr. Comey told him that his relationship with the president and the White House staff was now in the right place.

“‘I think we’ve kind of got them trained,’” Mr. Wittes said, paraphrasing what Mr. Comey told him.

But he said Mr. Comey had also described other encounters with the president that had troubled him.

One of those occurred at the White House on Jan. 22, just two days after Mr. Trump was sworn in. That day, Mr. Trump hosted a ceremony to honor law enforcement officials who had provided security for the inauguration.

Mr. Wittes said Mr. Comey told him that he initially did not want to go to the meeting because the F.B.I. director should not have too close a relationship with the White House. But Mr. Comey went because he wanted to represent the bureau.

The ceremony occurred in the Blue Room of the White House, where many senior law enforcement officials — including the Secret Service director — had gathered. Mr. Comey — who is 6 feet 8 inches tall and was wearing a dark blue suit that day – told Mr. Wittes that he tried to blend in with the blue curtains in the back of the room, in the hopes that Mr. Trump would not spot him and call him out.

“He thought he had gotten through and not been noticed or singled out and that he was going to get away without an individual interaction,” Mr. Wittes said Mr. Comey told him.

But Mr. Trump spotted Mr. Comey and called him out.

“Oh and there’s Jim,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s become more famous than me.”

With an abashed look on his face, Mr. Comey walked up to Mr. Trump.

“Comey said that as he was walking across the room he was determined that there wasn’t going to be a hug,” Mr. Wittes said. “It was bad enough there was going to be a handshake. And Comey has long arms so Comey said he pre-emptively reached out for a handshake and grabbed the president’s hand. But Trump pulled him into an embrace and Comey didn’t reciprocate. If you look at the video, it’s one person shaking hands and another hugging.”

Mr. Comey told Mr. Wittes of another encounter, on March 1, that also troubled him.

Mr. Wittes said that Mr. Comey said that he received a call from the White House and was told that “the president needs to talk to you urgently.”

“He’s about to get on the helicopter, so he doesn’t get on the helicopter,” Mr. Wittes said. “And then when the president gets on he just wants to chitchat.”

Mr. Wittes said that Mr. Comey told him that he perceived the call as Mr. Trump still “trying to get him on the team and he saw it in light of his refusal to give him his loyalty.”

“Trump was still trying to get him on board,” Mr. Wittes said.

After this article was published, Mr. Wittes posted his own account of his conversations with Mr. Comey on Lawfare. It included another discussion, as described earlier to The Times, in which Mr. Wittes told Mr. Comey he was encouraged by the fact that the Senate was likely to confirm Rod J. Rosenstein, a longtime federal prosecutor, as the deputy attorney general.

To Mr. Wittes’s surprise, Mr. Comey did not completely agree with him.

“He said, ‘I don’t know. I have some concerns. He’s good, he’s solid but he’s also a survivor and you don’t survive that long without making some compromises and I’m concerned about that.’”

Weeks after his confirmation, Mr. Rosenstein wrote a memo that Mr. Trump initially cited as the justification for firing Mr. Comey. Mr. Rosenstein told members of the Senate on Thursday that Mr. Trump had already decided to fire him when he wrote it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/u...rump.html?_r=0

Hmmmm. So Comey has lunch with "friends" and discusses agency business that is then leaked to the press by the "friend", but Comey isn't comfortable discussing agency business with the President of the United States, who is legally and constitutionally responsible for this agency?

Really?!

"Loose lips sink ships", Comey, and I think in your fantasy DC dream world you live in, you just sank yours. Keep it up. Trump has your number, he knew you were responsible for at least some of the leaks, and you might be responsible for them all. The CIA might be responsible for some of the leaks, but I personally think the FBI hacked the DNC, not the Russians, and Comey is responsible for the leaks out of the FBI. He may even have been involved in the unmasking of Michael Flynn. After all, he's the one who used a phony dossier on Trump to obtain the FISA warrant against Carter Page.

Comey is a Hillary Shrill, a disenchanted Snowflake. His candidate he tried to hand the election to, lost despite his illegal efforts on her behalf. Trump knew what Comey did during the campaign was wrong, then during that last week to 10 days, Trump said Comey had corrected his mistake and bragged on him, only to then find out it was a fake correction, not real, as the FBI pretended to have some "wizard" program that said "yep, everyone is innocent". But Trump won anyway, in spite of all the FBI shenanigans. Trump won because he worked his ass off, did all those rallies in the right places, had the right policies and agenda to fix our country, and snared more than enough states to win the electoral college.

Trump didn't collude with the Russians. Trump wants to change US policy on Russia, campaigned openly about this, because he wants a better improved relationship with one of the most important countries on the planet and one to whom we owe much. I heard a pundit talk against Russia the other day and said "Russia has never been our ally and never will be our ally." Russia was our most important ally during WWII. We could not have won that war without the incredible commitment, casualties, losses and suffering of the Russians in WWII. And in spite of all the differences of opinions since WWII, Russia has always been our ally. It's time that truth comes out, it's time that truth be known, it's time for Trump to call the bluff of the Russia Haters and pave a New Way for a New Day for World Peace, and he is just the man with the common sense, intelligence and unwavering loyalty to our country to do it.

There was no Trump or Trump campaign "collusion" with the Russians. There isn't even to date any evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC. There is however an unsolved murder of Seth Rich who was the IT specialist at the DNC. There is the news report that it was the FBI who informed the DNC that it had been hacked before the DNC knew it had been hacked. How would the FBI know the DNC had been hacked when the DNC didn't know it had been hacked? The FBI went to the DNC and spoke with the IT specialist at the DNC about the hacking, who would be the one to discuss this with, and that IT specialist was Seth Rich, who ended up murdered a few days later.

So solve the Seth Rich murder and as a sideline, you'll solve the DNC hacking mystery. The Russians didn't threaten, influence or interfere with our "democracy". The DNC who was unfair to Bernie Sanders, the FBI who was spying on the DNC, and whoever murdered Seth Rich who would be a potential witness to both events, threatened, influenced and interfered with our "democracy" and none of it had anything to do with Trump or the Trump campaign.

Trump's got this. He's already figured out that we have a rotten element somewhere in the FBI. The reason Comey was "unsettled" is because he knew Trump was on to him and playing him like a fiddle. How Comey thought for a minute that Trump would let someone who tried to throw a Presidential election to anyone let alone to Hillary Clinton stay on as head of the FBI shows Comey is actually an idiot.

And Comey isn't the only idiot. Anyone who thinks they can frame Trump for "collusion" with the Russians needs to resign, go find another line of work, lawyer up and wait for their own subpoenas. In my opinion.

Listening to some news shows this morning, the concern of the CORRUPT MEDIA today is that Trump won't change. If Trump would just change and be like all the other Presidents, then this would all just blow over and go quiet, but he won't they exclaim. He tweets, he calls the Russian Inquiry a Witch Hunt, and therefore they claim he hurts himself. In other words, if Trump had just gone silently into the night, said nothing more about the inquiry or Comey or Russia or anything else that bothers the CORRUPT MEDIA, then all would be over. But he didn't, he tweeted, he denied collusion, he took them all on in the press conference, he fought back, he explained the many reasons why Comey had to go, he used the question to emphasize his agenda on jobs, industry and trade, and all the CORRUPT MEDIA could go home with was: nothing. They lost, so what happens in the middle of the night, a "friend" of Comey comes out to discuss a hug, Comey's unsettled feelings, Comey wanting to "distance" from Trump.

I heard this morning that according to his "friend" Witte, Comey was so uncomfortable with Trump that Comey would practice what he's going to say with associates before going to the meeting with Trump.

Comey ain't right. I said it after that Wednesday testimony before the Judiciary Committee when Grassley said "Eegads". There are 20 or more reasons why Comey had to go and that's from just what we know from the testimony and live statements.

That's before we have an investigation of the FBI.

Comey is guilty of colluding with the clintons to cover up or make little her enormous sins that anyone else would have been hung for. He also damaged the FBI, the Ag office - all very dirty and stinks to high heaven. But was told by obama and clan, do it that way & he did.

As things heated up, this last testimony, his voice was high pitched like a lying little girl - he was cracking, obviously. He had to go.

Originally Posted by artist

Comey is guilty of colluding with the clintons to cover up or make little her enormous sins that anyone else would have been hung for. He also damaged the FBI, the Ag office - all very dirty and stinks to high heaven. But was told by obama and clan, do it that way & he did.

As things heated up, this last testimony, his voice was high pitched like a lying little girl - he was cracking, obviously. He had to go.

LOL!!! Exactly and well said, artist.

I watched that testimony with dropped jaw. I never liked Comey because of the awful prosecution he led against Martha Stewart, the same reason I never liked Rudy Guiliani because of the absurd prosecution he led against Leona Helmsley.

But when I watched that whining sniveling Comey carry on in that hearing .... I was stunned. Chuck Grassley couldn't believe what he was hearing and said quite plainly, "Eegads." Comey ain't right. And when Trump watched that or certain parts of it, I doubt he had time to listen to it all, Trump knew right away that Comey is a loon, a nut job and there was no more time to spare, Comey had to be removed as soon as possible preferably while he was out of town and out of the office. That's how it's done in business. Otherwise you have be escorted out by security, so he saved Comey those bad scenes.

Trump acted swiftly and I think appropriately given the circumstances. Trump had that big meeting scheduled with the Russians and he wanted Comey out of control of the FBI before that important meeting. Comey is part of this Anti-Russia keep the "evil empire" mirage alive crowd and that won't work in an administration that wants to mend the fences, correct the problems, resolve the issues and establish much better relationships with this important country of Russia. Trump campaigned on a new relationship with Russia, and he'll do everything possible to achieve that.

Top Republican Discovers Easy Way To Get Whole Truth From Loretta Lynch

By Harry Hibbs Posted in News Politics
Posted on May 20, 2017





As you have probably heard by now, in the exact same week before the FBI’s decision of letting Hillary Clinton walk free, Bill Clinton had a top secret get-together with Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
This of course was during the time his wife was being investigated for breaking national security laws.


As the Democrats and their media overlords continue to wind themselves up over the Trump conversation with Comey about the FBI’s investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn, Texas Republican Rep.Pete Sessions is reminding the nation that Barack Obama stifled the investigation into the untoward, secretive meeting Bill Clinton had with the very person supposedly investigating his wife.


“If the New York Times has [Comey’s memo] that means we’re going to be able to see it and I would assume that would be fair. I assume that Mr. Comey also kept, if he’s disturbed by the same memos, that he gave to or about when Mrs. Clinton’s husband appeared in the jet with the attorney general,” Sessions told The Daily Caller.

“So I assume that memo would be available to us also. And I would assume that we will see a number of disturbing trends that took place at the Department of Justice [during the Obama administration] for whatever he’s claiming and I’ll look forward to seeing all those,” Sessions said.


“But I cannot comment, because I have not seen them but I would assume that Mr. Comey that if he kept one on this visit, evidently, he has others. Now I look forward to seeing those.”

You’ll recall back in June of 2016, just as the FBI and the Department of Justice was looking into whether or not Hillary Clinton had broken America’s national security laws with her illegal private email server, Bill Clinton tracked down Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch and engaged in a secret meeting with her onboard her private plane sitting on the runways of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.


Even James Comey later admitted that this secret meeting should never have happened.


And I remind you, we STILL don’t know what was said in that meeting.


So, as the left goes gaga over comments that Trump may or may not have made to Comey, Rep. Sessions wants to remind the nation about the hypocrisy of both the Democrats and the media.


After all, neither the media nor the Democrat Party was overly concerned that the husband of a person under investigation by the Department of Justice — a woman running for president, mind you — could get a secret, off-the-record meeting with the Attorney General of the United States.


Additionally, neither the Democrats nor the media are much worried that Hillary later said she may keep Lynch as AG if she were to win the White House and that Lynch subsequently decided that the investigation into Hillary’s illegal, unsecure communications was to be dropped.


It seems to any sensible American that the charges against the Clintons and the Obama administration are far, far more serious than anything Trump told Comey.


h/t: youngcons
http://www.usatwentyfour.com/top-rep...loretta-lynch/